How to request the Garbage Collector in node.js to run?

Question

At startup, it seems my node.js app uses around 200MB of memory. If I leave it alone for a while, it shrinks to around 9MB.

Is it possible from within the app to:

Answer 1

Node allows us to manually trigger Garbage Collection. This can be accomplished by running Node with --expose-gc flag (i.e. node --expose-gc index.js).
Once node is running in that mode, you can programmatically trigger a Garbage Collection at any time by calling global.gc() from your program.

ex -

// Force garbage collection every time this function is called
try {
  if (global.gc) {global.gc();}
} catch (e) {
  console.log("`node --expose-gc index.js`");
  process.exit();
}